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Persichilli: Liberals shooting blanks at a ghost

The Liberal party is trying hard to find a lethal weapon to use against the Conservatives. Unfortunately for the Liberals, even the deadliest weapon can’t kill a ghost.

The lethal weapon they’re looking for is a ballot question they don’t have, while the ghost is the Conservative party they have failed to frame. The Liberals have thrown anything they can get their hands on at the ghost, but the Conservatives seem to be glued to a 10-point lead that is not enough for a majority but doesn’t help the Liberals to make their case to Canadians.

First they tried to frame the debate around democracy, contempt for Parliament and corruption. But this message lacked resonance because they weren’t able to convince Canadians that their democracy is at risk. The dysfunctionality of Parliament — for which the blame crosses party lines — has been well known to Canadians for some time, and the corruption charges were coming from a noncredible source.

Of course, the Liberals talk about the $30 billion for the 65 F-35 jets as the mantra to solve all economic problems, but Canadians know the cost is not for next year but spread over 30 years.

They also talk about the $6 billion corporate tax cuts, approved since 2007, in trying to paint the government as one that “cut taxes to the rich and not to the poor.” Canadians, however, know the cuts were approved with Liberal votes and they also know that many of the shares in the big corporations are owned by the almighty pension funds, meaning by the average Canadian worker.

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The Liberals, at best, have had a convoluted message that isn’t reaching Canadians.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, have a very specific ballot question — stability versus chaos — and they say that the future of our economy hangs in the balance.

Given the threats to the global economy and the question marks surrounding the capacity of our own economy to create more jobs, did the Liberals really believe Canadians were ready to change governments because of Bev Oda’s mistakes or Helena Guergis’s tears?

Voters want to talk about real issues that concern them. In fact, the only time the opinion polls were generous toward the Liberals was when they presented a document that resembled a political platform. Their message was slowly coming out — but, again, as soon as they heard of a foggy report about G8 expenses, they embraced the word of Auditor General Sheila Fraser like divine gospel and went off-message once more to talk about something the electorate had already told them it wasn’t interested in.

As in the past, the Liberals are now switching the focus of their campaign in midstream and trying to find that ever-elusive secret weapon. They believe they have one with medicare. There’s no doubt that health care is one of the most important issues on the minds of Canadians along with the economy, but it’s sad to see such an important issue used only as a tool to win an election without having anything fresh to say.

Last week, they unleashed former finance minister and prime minister Paul Martin as a champion to defend medicare. With all due respect, Martin was the only Canadian minister of finance to cut funds for medicare and education in the late ’90s. Later, his government gave back to the provinces only what he had cut earlier. While I’m not disputing the appropriateness of the cuts for medicare to eliminate the deficit, I find it perplexing that the Liberal party believes Martin can be used as the poster boy to promote medicare.

There is still a week to go and the Liberals have limited time to find the magic bullet to shoot down the Conservative effort to get a majority. Right now, the pendulum is swinging between a weak Conservative majority or a strong Conservative minority that could morph into a weaker Liberal minority government with the support of the NDP and the separatists.

This is a campaign in which the Liberals declared war before determining their motivation, while Harper has decided to play it safe with an emphasis on tactics over passion.

It’s not very inspiring.

Angelo Persichilli is the political editor of Corriere Canadese. His column appears Sunday.

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